Preliminaries

Confessions of a Rose-struck Gardener

I remember the first rose I saw.

I was a small boy, following my mother up the steps to a relative's house.  There beside the walkway were two yellow rosebushes in full bloom.  I stopped in my tracks, astonished by their beauty.  I can still see those roses, yellow as butter in the Louisiana sunlight.

I asked my mother why we didn't have any roses.  "They're too much trouble," she said.  Mother had a way of sounding pretty final, and I put roses out of my mind.

In 1970 I bought a Victorian house in San Francisco, a building so run-down that it had been condemned.  With the house came a backyard:  a sloping sand dune that had never been cultivated.  The restoration went slowly, so I began to garden in order to escape the plaster and sheetrock dust.  The vegetables I planted did tolerably well, but didn't inspire me, and I lost interest in gardening after two years.

Then one night I had dinner with a friend who lived on Nob Hill.  Pat Martin was not only a fabulous cook--she used to plan whole meals around the homemade sausage my father sends me from Louisiana.  She was also a gifted gardener.  On this particular evening, she served a dessert garnished with chocolate formed on Savoy cabbage leaves.  It was a memorable finish to a perfect meal, but the "cabbages" I remember even more vividly were the roses she had set out everywhere in bud vases.  The blooms were huge--the kind you want to touch to see if they're real.

Pat knew about my lackluster efforts to grow vegetables.  She also knew that I was just then trying to give up cigarettes and needed both an outlet for my nervous energy and something to do with my hands.  She practically ordered me to grow roses.  "They're a lot of work," she said, sounding at that moment a lot like my mother, "and an enormous pleasure."

The starter set Pat gave me comprised the twelve varieties she liked best (I still have nine of the original bushes).  I planted them in my backyard sand dune, after I had considerably enriched it with peat moss and fertilizer.  The results were not spectacular.  Some of the bushes did bloom, but since I had elected not to spray, mildew had wrought such havoc by midsummer that I had to completely defoliate more than one bush and start over.

The next hear I joined the San Francisco chapter of the American Rose Society.  And I sprayed.  For the first time my neighbors began to refer to my backyard as a rose garden.  I began going to rose shows and saw varieties that I wanted to grow.  I learned to appreciate form, balance, and proportion as well as color, scent, and stem length.  The more I learned about roses, the more my addiction grew.  I increased my bushes to one hundred.  The first rose I entered in a competition, a bloom of the Chinese lacquer red rose Ole', won a blue ribbon.  Then I won the Novice Sweepstakes in both the San Francisco Rose Show in May and the San Francisco Flower Show in August.  I was hooked.

Over the next several years, I thought constantly about how to find room for more and more bushes.  I planted them in containers on my sundeck, in my too-shady front yard, in precarious spots near side fences.  In the end, although I had almost to inch through the garden sideways, I got nearly two hundred bushes in my 25-foot-by-40-foot backyard.  When I couldn't possibly squeeze in one more bush, the next step was inevitable.

I went commercial.  I had been selling blooms at a flower shop near the house for quite a while and had found that there was an eager market for the large, long-lived, fragrant garden roses my backyard was producing.  Still, friends tried to talk me out of a commercial venture.  "Selling blooms from your garden is one thing," they said, shaking their heads, "but growing outdoor roses as a business is much too risky a proposition."

But there was no use talking to me.  I was incurably rose-struck, and I would have my rose farm, risky or not.

When I saw Garden Valley Ranch, I knew my idea would work.  It is in Petaluma, a rural market town forty-three miles north of San Francisco.  The land I fell in love with is a meadow beside a working dairy.  To the west are gentle hills that roll toward the sea.  The site had the cool, foggy nights I was used to in the city, a climate roses adore if you control mildew.  The soil is sandy and easily mixed, and water is ample.  It rarely gets to 100 degrees in summer and seldom freezes in winter.

With the help of some less-skeptical friends, we planted 1,200 bushes in December 1980.  Although a few problems arose--the wind, the thrips, the voracious cucumber beetles, the infernal gophers--the success of Garden Valley Ranch has exceeded our rosiest expectations.  We now have more than 4,000 bushes in hundreds of varieties, and sell about 90 percent of our blossoms.  We ship blooms across the country and have proved that garden roses have a market.  We also practice every single suggestion in this book.

I have stopped competing, although I still could (the American Rose Society allows commercial-grower members to compete as long as their entries are taken from their private gardens).  Now I am interested in hybridizing and exploring innovative growing practices.

Looking over the chapter headings in this book makes me cringe as I remember my mistakes.  I made almost every one I will warn you about.  I fell for misleading catalogue descriptions and ordered roses that proved to be flops.  I planted bushes too deep and didn't fertilize them at all the first year because someone at a nursery said I shouldn't.  My idea of maintaining bushes was to water them a lot when sunny weather made me want to be outside, and practically not at all when it was dreary.  At first, I didn't spray, period; when I did, I launched a random, totally ineffective program.  I cut every bloom with as much stem as I wanted, in a casual disregard for the need to shape bushes.  Pruning to me meant removing only what was visibly dead.

One thing is certain:  mother was right. Roses are a lot of trouble.  But they sure do make up for it.  When I get home in the evening, I change into jeans, get my shears, and head out back to the garden.  Once I start, it's hard to stop.  There's always something to do.  Perhaps a new variety is blooming for the first time, and I have to decide if it's anything like what I was hoping for.  Or new growth appears in a strategic place, and I want to train it in the right direction with some early staking.  And then there's the delicious agony of what to cut, and for whom.

My purpose in writing this book is simple.  If you already grow roses well, I want you to grow them better.  If you don't grow them well, I want to improve your chances for success.  If you don't grow them at all, I want to encourage you to start.